‘Welcome, welcome, fair princess!’ exclaimed the astonished prince. ‘You have heard me from within your hiding-place speaking with indignation because my meal had been disturbed. How little did I imagine such an honour had been done me as that it should have served you!’ And he sat down beside her, and they finished the meal together. When it was over, the princess went away into her candelabrum again; and the next night the prince said to his servant: ‘In case anyone eats my supper while I am out, you had better bring up a double portion.’ The next day he had not his supper only, but all his meals, brought into his apartment; nor did he ever leave it at all now, so happy was he in the society of the princess.
Then the king and queen began to question about him, saying: ‘What has bereft our son of his senses, seeing that now he no more follows the due occupations of his years, but sits all day apart in his room?’
Then they called him to them and said: ‘It is not well that you should sit thus all day long in your private apartments alone. It is time that you should bethink yourself of taking a wife.’
But the prince answered, ‘No other wife will I have but the candelabrum.’
When his parents heard him say this they said: ‘Now there is no doubt that he is mad;’ and they spoke no more about his marrying.
But one day, the queen-mother coming into his apartment suddenly, found the door of the candelabrum open, and the princess sitting talking with the prince. Then she, too, was struck with her beauty, and said: ‘If this is what you were thinking of when you said you would marry the candelabrum, it was well judged.’ And she took the princess by the hand and led her to the presence of the king. The king, too, praised her beauty, and she was given to the prince to be his wife.
And the king her father, when he heard of the alliance, he too was right glad, and said he esteemed it far above that of the ugly old king he wanted her to have married at the first.
[The mode of telling adopted by Roman narrators makes a way out of the difficulty which this group of stories presents at first sight in the king seeming to be fated by supernatural appointment to marry his daughter. One says, ‘the queen did not say he was to marry her the ring fitted, but he was not to marry any it did not fit.’ The other says, the slipper was a supernatural slipper, and would not fit anyone whom he could marry. Whether this was a part of the traditional story or the gloss of the repeater, I do not pretend to decide. In the ‘Candeliera,’ though similar in the main, this difficulty does not arise.
My Roman narrators seem to have been fonder of stories of maidens than of youths. I have only one of the latter, and by no means an uncommon one, to set off against all the Stepmother stories of the former. It, however, is the male counterpart of a prolific family in which the girls figure under similar circumstances. Grimm gives several, particularly ‘Frau Holle,’ p. 104. Dr. Dasent gives ‘The two Stepsisters.’ In the Tales of Italian Tirol are two, ‘Cölla döllö doi sores’ and ‘Le due sorelle.’ And among the Russian Tales, ‘Frost,’ p. 214. It has also been connected with the large group in which a rich brother (sometimes the elder, sometimes the younger) leaves his poor brother to starve, and ultimately gets terribly punished for enviously grasping at the poor one’s subsequent good fortune: but the structure of these is very different.]